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Running Nomad for a Home Server

mrkaran.dev

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Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#131

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

sneak wrote: post #58
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wish we’d all agree to one templated configuration format. If you mean a standard configuration file format, that has almost never happened in the entire history of computing. There are standard data formats , sure, but to standardize a configuration file, all the applications need to be limited to the functionality expressed in a single config file format. Most applications hate that, because they want to add infi…

There was pretty broad ad hoc standardization in dos/windowsland on the ini-file format, which was broadly formalized as toml years later.

Those are really data formats, not configuration. Their only features seem to be expressing simple data in different types and structures. The only advantages toml even advertises are types and mapping to hash tables. Those are all things computers appreciate, but humans need more nuance and functionality.

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#132

Post by Aeolun »

chrizel wrote: post #20
parhamn wrote: post #9

Hashicorp has very cool stuff but I am not a fan of the config language they use on all their projects. It’s fine when I’m in an infrastructure type role and recency recall is fine but when Hashicorps tools are in my periphery it is a pain. Anyone share this? I guess the alternative is templated tomls/yamls/pseudo-jsons. Wish we’d all agree to one templated configuration format.

I myself would love to see more usage of HCL... after writing a lot of Terraform configurations, it feels so much nicer for me than any JSON or YAML/Helm configuration I have written to this day. We should agree on some kind of HCL-based industry standard and leave all these workarounds via JSON/YAML behind us... e.g. doing Helm logic with these Go templates just looks like a step backwards after writing Terraform HC…

I liked HCL until I did some infra writing in Pulumi Typescript, and now I just want all my config files to be code.

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#133

Post by viraptor »

josegonzalez wrote: post #115
viraptor wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be a significant lack of open source PaaS as you mentioned. And Dokku is unfortunately a very leaky bucket of abstractions - fun if you're learning docker, annoying otherwise. This kind of makes sense given how much work it is and how easy it is to monetize as a paid service.

As the maintainer of Dokku, I'd love to hear more about what you think we can improve here. It is certainly an abstraction over basic Docker commands, but so are other schedulers and platforms. That said, any feedback is more than welcome.

I can't recall the specifics, but keep running into issues when setting up port forwarding, attaching networks, etc. where I end up chasing the reason things don't work down to "docker inspect"-ing things. Usually it's some step I missed or overlooked, but the state I'm in just doesn't do anything useful. It makes sense I end up in that situation because I'm using something that maps to docker commands. I guess I expect a PaaS solution to own more of the system and tell me something like "the way you try to proxy doesn't make sense with the container you spawn", or "you added a network to attach to, and made other changes, the app will be restarted to apply it".

To be clear, I didn't want to say Dokku does things wrong. I'd like something that can validate changes and expected state. But if Dokku is supposed to be a "thin layer", that's cool.

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#134

Post by alias_neo »

RulerOf wrote: post #39
alias_neo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it particularly hard to manage Vault from the CLI. I deployed it some time ago and set up a bunch of backends, I don't recall the names of things or how I configured them and I want to backup that config to replicate it. The auto complete will give you the top level command and that's it. I haven't looked too hard because I got fed up, but i just want to dump the entire config so I can replicate it without hav…

I've been there. You basically want to be able `cd` into vault and list the contents interactively, but you can't. While the Web UI is probably the best vault explorer available, you might want to take a look at Vaku[1]. [1]: https://github.com/lingrino/vaku/blob/main/docs/cli/vaku.md#...

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#135

Post by alias_neo »

ddreier wrote: post #51
alias_neo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it particularly hard to manage Vault from the CLI. I deployed it some time ago and set up a bunch of backends, I don't recall the names of things or how I configured them and I want to backup that config to replicate it. The auto complete will give you the top level command and that's it. I haven't looked too hard because I got fed up, but i just want to dump the entire config so I can replicate it without hav…

We use Terraform to manage as much of the configuration of Vault (and Consul and Nomad) as we can. The provider is pretty good. This makes it a lot easier to get a 1000ft view of the configuration.

This is ultimately my goal. Our current state has been prototyped iteratively over a year or so. The goal is to replicate and document the current state so that we can automate it such as with Terraform.

Unfortunately, unlike, say Kubernetes, which encourages a declarative approach, learning to integrate and use Vault comes with a lot of imperative operations, none of which is stored anywhere for reuse.

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#136

Post by ForHackernews »

ipmb wrote: post #119
ForHackernews wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any lightweight but production-ready PaaS offerings out there? I know there's Dokku, https://flynn.io/ looked super promising but I think it's basically dead now, same for Deis that is dead and forked to https://web.teamhephy.com/ .

If you're on AWS, you might be interested our product https://apppack.io .

Thanks for the link. Honestly one of my goals is to avoid becoming too dependent on on proprietary clouds. If I wanted something that only works on Amazon, there's always ElasticBeanstalk/Amplify & friends.

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#137

Post by trabant00 »

humblepie wrote: post #19
trabant00 wrote: post #4

Nomad looks useful to me for use cases that have nothing to do with "a simple k8s" but more with distributed/HA systemd and cron. Just deployed a small 3 node cluster in prod last week for this: run some binaries with some parameters, make sure they restart on failure, have them move to another node if one fails or is rebooted, and don't waste resources by having a classical active/passive 2 node setup that doesn't s…

How easy is setting up nomad for this? Does this need a consul cluster too?

It took me 2 work days to read the docs, tutorials setup and tests. I had no prior knowledge of Nomad. So I would say it was very easy. Consul is optional, for my use case I did not use/need it.

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#138

Post by Aeolun »

sofixa wrote: post #33
outime wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

K8s targets a long list of things that Nomad just doesn't want to deal with in the name of simplicity - and that's ok, if that suits your use case. Some are mentioned in the post but I can think of secret management, load balancing, config management, routing, orchestration beyond workloads (e.g. storage), rollbacks/rollouts and many more. Perhaps in few areas there are some support but it's not what Nomad intends to…

> of secret management, load balancing, config management, routing, orchestration beyond workloads (e.g. storage), rollbacks/rollouts Nomad does all of these either natively ( rollbacks/rollouts) or via external tooling ( Vault, Consul, a load balancer). Unix philosophy and all that, and besides, Kubernetes doesn't do load balancing, and secret management is a joke.

If it does these things through external integrations, it’s not really something Nomad does.

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#139

Post by Aeolun »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #77
rektide wrote: post #67

A whole lot of anti- Kubernetes "you most likely don't need them and the increase in complexity makes it a pain to maintain" and "Kubernetes is exceedingly complex" in this thread & somewhat in this article. I agree that you probably don't need Kubernetes, and perhaps yeah it could be considered complex. But I think it's the right fit for most developers/doers & over time most operators too. Kubernetes is not Kuberne…

Yeah if there were a one-click install _complete_ local distribution of Kubernetes with a GUI, and that just read and migrated all your docker-compose.yaml files I think it would see much less complaints and teeth-gnashing from new folks. The existing tools like minikube, kind, microk8s, are still too clunky and don't include everything you'd want for a good local setup (login/authentication, ingress, registry, easy…

My problem is there is no way to get started with those things without knowing all of them.

Re: Running Nomad for a Home Server

#140

Post by tetha »

Axsuul wrote: post #120
tetha wrote: post #59

We're pulling the trigger tomorrow to migrate the first productive system to nomad, and launch 1-2 new products on nomad first. It's quite exciting. We chose nomad there, because it's a business requirement to be able to self-host from an empty building due to the data we process - that's scary with K8. And K8 is essentially too much for the company. It's like 8 steps into the future from where most teams in product…

What did you migrate from?

Currently, the automated parts are on terraform/chef and there is a bunch of manually setup stuff in the company.
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